Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Transitioning from Prison to the Community

A helpful reader pointed out that Texas is among the states chosen by the National Institute of Corrections for the second round of their Transitions from Prison to Community initiative. According to NIC:

Six Sites Selected to Participate in the National Institute of Corrections’ Transition from Prison to the Community (TPC) Initiative

Six jurisdictions have been invited by the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) to participate in its Transition from Prison to the Community (TPC) Initiative, a project designed to help states articulate a comprehensive and strategic approach to transition from prison. The States of Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming will work together with NIC and its Cooperative Agreement Partners, the Center for Effective Public Policy (CEPP) and the Urban Institute (UI).

This assistance is intended as a resource for state jurisdictions willing and able to work with NIC technical assistance providers to put into place the principles, approaches, and strategies that make up the Transition from Prison to the Community (TPC) Model (please visit the NIC Web site at http://www.nicic.gov/Library/022669 for a full discussion of the Model and for more information about previous iterations of this initiative.) Assistance will be provided in the form of a “site coordinator” who will provide advice, facilitation, and access to other project resources such as cross-site exchanges, and access to a network of practitioners from the original eight TPC sites.

The project will also include the support of an evaluation specialist from the technical assistance team to guide each participating jurisdiction’s efforts to design and implement a measurement and evaluation strategy.

A just-created, still-somewhat minimalist website created in support of the program includes an online version of a reentry handbook describing in detail the TPD methodology and the results from their first round of pilots.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's too late for me, but let's hope this will be better than the Changes class inmates go through. Nearly everything I heard in the class I went through was either wrong, outdated or just plain b.s.

Anonymous said...

Transitions from Prison to Community.

Don't you wish more folks would do the right thing while they are still in the community so they wouldn't have to transition? I guess that's too much to ask.

Individual responsiblity vs collective action.

Anonymous said...

I am troubled by the word "Re entry" , as it is being used by corrections professionals. Re entry is not relevant or necessary unless a person has been banished. If a local correctional facility is truly a community-based facility, there should be no need for "re-entry". In other words, if a person is part of the community, even if in jail, there is no need for "re-entry". Transition, yes...but not re-entry.The language of correction professional is full of similar trouble some phrases. For example, lit is common for government agencies to have what they call "intake" offices. This communicates an institutional bias that their function is to take people in, not screen them out. The phrase "Alternative to Incarceration" expresses a preference for incarceration which is abandoned only in the face of crowding or fiscal constraint. A more neutral phase might be "options to secure confinement", which would convey the notion that there are a range of appropriate, legitimate options. They are not simply "alternatives" to incarceration. Our language conveys our attitudes, our beliefs, our bias.